Friday is National Religious Freedom Day, and what better time to consider where threats to American religious freedom originate. (Hint – it’s not with Bible-thumping Baptist preachers or dogmatic Catholic cardinals.)

Progressives, who love to congratulate themselves on their tolerance and pluralism, are increasing intolerant when it comes to religion – or Christianity, anyway. Muslims seem to get a pass. On college campuses, Christian groups that refuse to allow non-believers to become officers have been forced to disband. In South Carolina, the atheist group Freedom from Religion Foundation pressured a privately-owned restaurant to cease offering discounts to customers who pray before their meals. The groups suggested Mary’s Gourmet Diner was in violation of the Civil Rights Act.

On Wednesday night, the major broadcast networks failed to report on news that an internal memo was sent to members of the intelligence community by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper praising their efforts on identifying the rise of ISIS after President Barack Obama blamed them for not doing so in an interview on Sunday’s 60 Minutes.

The memo was able to be obtained by Fox News and its chief intelligence correspondent, Catherine Herridge and it detailed how government intelligence has, for two years, “monitored, assessed and called attention to the expansion of ISIS.” 

The establishment press, and now apparently the FBI, have a problem on their hands: an alleged killer who converted to Islam; expressed sentiments favored by terrorists; killed a woman by employing terrorists' favored method, i.e., beheading; shouted Islamic slogans while carrying out his evil deed; and was trying to kill someone else when another armed person shot and wounded him.

Their problem is that political correctness demands that they try to convince the public that Alton Nolen's deeds weren't linked to terrorism, and that they weren't even terrorist in nature.

On Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a new report documenting how abortions are being funded by taxpayers under ObamaCare despite a provision in the law stating that abortions will not be covered under ObamaCare insurance plans. When the Tuesday evening newscasts for the major broadcast networks had passed, however, none of them devoted even a second to the story.

According to the report, 28 states (plus D.C.) did not restrict ObamaCare insurance plans that included abortions as a benefit while 23 states did have that restriction in place. In addition, the GAO found that 17 out of 18 insurers sampled did not bill individuals separately for abortion coverage within their plans.

When several members of Congress set out in the early 1990s to improve fiscal reporting and internal controls in the federal government, one thing they certainly had a right to expect is that the press would report on lapses as embarrassments, and that otherwise nonchalant or reluctant bureaucrats would figure out that it would be in their best interest to tighten their ships. It hasn't happened, largely because the press quickly got bored, enabling the bureaucrats to thumb their noses at those who called them out for weak reporting or control violations.

To name just one glaring example: Concerning the Internal Revenue Service, in August of last year, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration happily reported "the downgrade of the information security material weakness to a significant deficiency during the Fiscal Year 2012 financial statement audit," and that "the IRS removed it from the December 31, 2012, remediation plan" (that's bureaucratese for "finally solved the problem") — 19 years after it was first identified in 1993. In that context, let's look at an outrageous situation at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.